Mitt Romney doesn’t like it that President Obama’s re-election campaign in a new video decided to tout the president’s decision to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and to question — based on his comments from 2007 — whether Romney would have done the same thing. Here’s Romney complaining about the video ad on CBS this morning:

ROMNEY: And the idea to try to politicize this, and to say, “oh, I, President Obama would have done it one way and Mitt Romney would have done it another,” is really disappointing. Let’s not make the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden a politically divisive event. There are plenty of differences between President Obama and myself. But let’s not make up ones based on, “Well he might not have done this.” It’s disappointing and it’s unfortunate and it’s taking an event that really brought America together.

Back in 2004, President Bush ran a smear campaign against challenger Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) which undermined his service in Vietnam and questioned Kerry’s ability and determination to protect the United States — just three years removed from the 9/11 attacks — from another terror strike. “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again,” then Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

And while Romney complains about Obama’s alleged “politicization” now, he willfully participated in the Bush-Cheney smear campaign on Kerry in 2004. During an August 9, 2004 (accessed via Lexis/Nexis) interview on Fox News, Romney suggested that Kerry would “twiddle his thumbs” when dealing with terrorism and in September 2004, also on Fox News, Romney said Kerry is too much of a flip-flopper to protect the country:

ROMNEY: [M]ost has already been said about John Kerry. I think people know pretty well that he’s a guy who has a hard time finding which side of a position to come down on. But I’m going to focus on the fact that our nation needs strong leadership. We’re under attack, militarily, economically. Our very way of life is under attack. And we need to have the kind of steady, strong leadership, which is represented by Dick Cheney, and by of course, President George W. Bush.

In his speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, Romney said “America is under attack from almost every direction,” later adding, “On the just war our brave soldiers are fighting to protect free people everywhere, there is no question: George W. Bush is right, and the ‘Blame America First’ crowd is wrong.”

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also notes that during his speech at the 2008 RNC, Romney “blasted Obama as untrustworthy when it comes to combating ‘the threat from radical, violent jihad,’ which he contrasted with John McCain, who, apparently unlike Obama, understands that ‘radical, violent Islam is evil,’ and will do everything he can to defeat it.”

“Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is ‘politicizing’ an important national event,” Jon Meacham writes today, noting that Obama’s alleged “politicizing” might be a bit different from what the GOP knows. “In this sense,” Meacham writes, “‘politicizing’ might be best translated as ‘beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.’”

Last week, the State Department released a February 2006 memo from then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top aide, Philip D. Zelikow, opposing the Justice Department’s authorization of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (i.e. torture) by CIA officers questioning terrorist suspects. Zelikow concluded in the memo that the techniques DOJ authorized should be considered “‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment’ within the meaning of Artical 16″ of the Convention Against Torture.

Zelikow — who has previously spoken out publicly against President Bush’s torture program — will publish a “damning article” in the upcoming issue of the Houston Law Journal, Salon reports (emphasis added):

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.” In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

While Zelikow calls on the White House to be more forthcoming and transparent about its own counter-terrorism methods, he praises President Obama for abandoning Bush’s torture polices Noting the Obama administration’s success in combatting terrorism and al-Qaeda in general, Zelikow concludes that “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods.”

Yesterday the National Security Archive released a newly declassified February, 2006 memo from then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top aide, Philip D. Zelikow, opposing the Justice Department’s authorization of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (i.e. torture) by CIA officers questioning terrorist suspects. “All copies of the memo…were thought to have been destroyed,” the Archive writes.

Zelikow summarized his views contained in the 2006 memo in an article on Foreign Policy’s website in April, 2009 and again in congressional testimony one month later. “At the time, in 2005 [and in 2006],” Zelikow wrote in 2009, “I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning” behind DOJ’s authorization of torture. He added: “I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC’s [Office of Legal Counsel's] views unsustainable.”

Indeed, in the newly declassified 2006 memo, Zelikow writes that while the State Department agreed with DOJ’s determination in 2005 that Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture (which prohibits “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture”) does not apply to CIA interrogations world wide,” he countered that “the situation has now changed.” What had changed was the fact that Congress passed a law applying Article 16 to conduct by U.S. officials anywhere in the world.

Zelikow concluded that practices the OLC authorized “should be considered ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment’ within the meaning of Artical 16″ while going on to explain what he views are techniques to be “least likely to be sustained” (waterboarding, walling, dousing, stress positions, and cramped confinement) and those that are “most likely to be sustained” (“basic detention conditions” and slaps).

Zelikow’s 2006 memo doesn’t deviate much from his 2005 memo on the subject that was made public shortly before his congressional hearing in May, 2009. In the 2005 memo, Zelikow and other top officials advised President Bush that the United States treat terror suspects as if they were “civilian detainees under the law of war.” The memo continued (emphasis added):

We are not saying that these detainees are necessarily entitled to this status. To be clear: We are giving them a temporary status they do not deserve. But we are not doing this for them. We are doing it for us.

Zelikow wasn’t the only Bush administration official that opposed the torture program. Bush’s top adviser Karen Hughes said in May, 2009 that she was also concerned about the program. “I was very vocal in the internal debate,” she said. “I worried about how that would make us look in the eyes of the world.”

Read More on the Bush administration’s “torture memos” here and here.

The headlines about Condoleezza Rice’s new memoir have mostly focused on the tit-for-tat between the former Secretary of State and former Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Rice called naive and said claims about her in Cheney’s memoir were an “attack on my integrity.” But the the reality is that Cheney and Rice see eye-to-eye on some big issues too. Talking with USA Today about the book, Rice, like Cheney, credited President Bush for the Arab Spring:

The demise of repressive governments in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere during this year’s “Arab spring,” she says, stemmed in part from Bush’s “freedom agenda,” which promoted democracy in the Middle East. “The change in the conversation about the Middle East, where people now routinely talk about democratization is something that I’m very grateful for and I think we had a role in that,” Rice says.

Indeed, Cheney had a similar take. When asked about the Arab Spring in August, Cheney replied, “I think that what happened in Iraq, the fact that we brought democracy, if you will, and freedom to Iraq, has had a ripple effect on some of those other countries.” And of course, according to Rice, the only to get rid of Saddam Hussein was to invade militarily:

“It would be a mistake to make the leap of faith that this [Arab Spring] would somehow have worked in Iraq,” she says in her first newspaper interview about her memoir, No Higher Honor. [...]

“Gadhafi … wasn’t Saddam Hussein in terms of his reach and capacity,” she says. “I do think that an Arab spring in Iraq would have been unthinkable under Saddam Hussein.”

There isn’t any real evidence of this claim that Bush’s democracy promotion in the Middle East (i.e. invasion of Iraq) had something to do with the Arab Spring. And this claim also ignores the agency of Arab citizens themselves in their collective action to rise up against social and economic injustices.

A 2010 RAND report found that “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.” And now, ironically, the Iraqi government is “offering key moral and financial support” to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists there.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook addressed this question back in July. “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas,” he said, adding, “There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship.” (HT: The Hill)